Back when my oldest son was much younger, he decided he wanted to collect and play Pokemon, which was not a strange thing at the time. It was really popular, so we bought a starter deck and a couple booster packs, read the instructions, and played.
I’m a huge fan of card games. I’ll play anything card related: Poker, Blackjack, Euchre, Hearts, Rummy, Go Fish, Strip Poker, War… doesn’t matter. There weren’t many kids his age in our neighborhood, and he wasn’t allowed to bring them to school, so I didn’t mind playing with him.
However, and this isn’t because it’s just a game for kids, Pokemon was really unfulfilling in strategy and game play.
We tried Yu-Gi-Oh next. The cards were more advanced in presentation and graphics, but I did not understand the rules at all. Neither did my son. He loved the show and would play with his younger brother, with his own made up rules… of course skewing the game in his favor to win every time. His brother eventually caught on, and after like 50 lost games in a row, would never play with him again.
This led us on a new quest for a collectable card game. Really, the only obvious choice was the granddaddy of the genre, Magic: The Gathering. It had easy enough strategy for the kids to understand, and enough variables to keep the game interesting on an adult card player level as well.
I wished it wasn’t called Magic: The Gathering though. It’s like Yoda named the game. It does not flow off the tongue, nor describe the game at all. In a nutshell, you pull monsters from your deck using mana cards to fight your opponents who are doing the same. The first person to lose all their hit points, obviously loses the game. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s just an overview. We played and collected for a couple of years until he moved on to sports.
Fast forward to present day:
The boys and I dabble in some new card games, such as Flux, Munchin, and Chez Geek and I happen upon an Australian (http://davidhardingrme.com/) whose family designs and publishes games and suddenly, I want to design a card game!
My first attempt was to do a spoof on the game that gave my son and myself so many hours of entertainment, Magic: The Gathering. You know, a humorous version of this game. After a little research, and reading about a rumored patent on the game play, I figured my spoof would never see the light of day. That’s okay though, because I have another game in the works. In the meantime, I thought I would share with you some of the prototypes for my Magic: The Gathering spoof:
Instead of the traditional mana used, you would have:
or
Here are a few of the standard cards:
There are more. I might host a private game for anyone interested. BYOB.
